"Find Their Level": African American Roots Tourism in Sierra Leone and Ghana by Adia Benton and Kwame Zulu Shabazz

Adia Benton & Kwame Zulu Shabazz

“Find their Level”African American Roots Tourism

in Sierra Leone and Ghana

“Just as a tree without roots is dead, a people withouthistory or cultural roots also becomes a dead people [...].

You take a tree, you can tell what kind of tree it is by looking atthe leaves. If the leaves are gone, you can look at the bark [...].

But when you find a tree with the leaves gone and the barkgone, everything gone, you call that a what? A stump.

And you can’t identify a stump as easily as you can identify a tree.”Malcolm X (1967)

“I heard the truth was in my roots, but I haven’t seen a tree all day [...].What about the leaves on trees with broken branches?

Where will they go after they’ve done their dances in the wind?Will they cry or simply die?”

Fertile Ground (2000)

In many “developing” and post-conflict African nations, cultural tourismhas been touted as a vital source of foreign exchange revenue for jumpstart-ing national development. This trend has led to a scramble in Africa byAfrican state officials seeking to “package” their nations in order to attractforeign capital1. In both Ghana and Sierra Leone, marketing logic hasbecome pervasive amongst political elites who have sought to attract the

1. Tourism is currently Ghana’s fourth largest foreign exchange earner behind gold,cocoa, and timber (in that order). Sierra Leone’s tourist industry is not as robustas Ghana’s. The Sierra Leone Tourist Board is actively promoting their newtourism industry; yet, there are no data showing the effects of their efforts.They do note that the war has hampered the tourist industry’s growth; thus, itis unlikely they are witnessing significant foreign exchange earnings comparableto Ghana’s.

Cahiers d’Études africaines, XLIX (1-2), 193-194, 2009, pp. 477-511.

4435$$ UN21 11-06-09 10:59:38 Imprimerie CHIRAT page 477

478 ADIA BENTON & KWAME ZULU SHABAZZ

patronage of diasporan “returnees”—descendants of the Middle Passage2

who travel to Africa in search of cultural and historical “roots”. The plan-ning and execution of national “packaging” often circumvents the ordinarycitizen; thus, the official agenda of these nation-states is sometimes at oddswith the aspirations of local Ghanaians, Sierra Leoneans and pan-Africansojourners alike. Moreover, this trend has contributed to considerable con-ceptual slippage and, consequently, vociferous debates over the meaning ofand criteria for asserting Africanness. In other instances, these conjunctureshave transformed and enhanced received notions of African identity.

As African American anthropologists3, “privileged” citizens of a hyper-developed superpower, and members of a marginalized racial group, we, theauthors, share a deep commitment to social justice and race consciousness4.In the US, race is a pervasive signifier of economic, social and political asym-metries. But in Ghana and Sierra Leone, while race is important, distinctionssuch as class and ethnicity are much more salient5. Our African interlocutorsoften attempt to fit us into categories that are meaningful to them:

“Where [in Africa] are you from?”“Are you Ghanaian/Sierra Leonean?”“What is your tribe?”“Are you a pure African?”“Where is your village?”“Who are your ancestors?”

2. The rise of president-elect Barack Obama foregrounds a demographic revolution:for the first time in history, voluntary emigration from Africa to the New Worldhas outstripped the forced emigration of their enslaved African ancestors (ROBERTS2005)—African American and African diaspora(n) ain’t what they used to be.For an excellent historical overview of this sea change and the global context thathas enabled it, see AKYEAMPONG (2000). For a localized ethnographic analysis ofthis phenomenon, see MATORY (1999). While we acknowledge the importanceof these transformations, we maintain that the “traditional” usage of AfricanAmerican and African diaspora(n) is still an analytically significant distinction(for example, although Obama has embraced the ethnonym “African American”,most neo-African Americans self-identify as “Africanour” usage of these twoterms to the descendants of the Middle Passage.

3. Many black/African cultural nationalists believe that anthropology can only bea tool of oppression. Many scholars agree that anthropology was in the pastintimately linked to colonialism (see especially RIGBY (1996) and MUDIMBE(1988). See MOORE (1996) for a dissenting view. But to its credit, anthropologyhas also advanced the Weberian principle of Verstehen, an empathic portrayalof difference, and the Boasian notion thave found to be imminently useful.

4. As advocates of race consciousness, we believe that so long as white supremacyexists we can best combat it collectively as black/African people. We reject themainstream scholarly and journalistic proclivity to either pathologize blackness/Africanness or, erase it altogether by reducing it, to borrow MALCOLM X’s (1967)felicitous phrasing, “racism in reverse”. There are, however, important differen-ces in our outlooks. Shabazz, for instance, self-identifies as a black nationalist,while Benton does not.

5. For a provocative analysis of why race matters in Ghana, see PIERRE (2009).


AFRICAN AMERICAN ROOTS (SIERRA LEONE & GHANA) 479

“Are your parents African/Ghanaian/Sierra Leonean?”“Do you have a Ghanaian/Sierra Leonean passport?”“Are you a slave?”“You are a Big Man/Woman”6

“Are you a white person/stranger?”

These engagements remind us that as scholars using anthropologicallyinformed rituals of observation and participation, we, too, are the subjectsof observation, critique, and local theorizing. This hermeneutical circle(Apter 1992: 213) informs our self-perceptions as engaged scholars who,hopefully, advance research agendas that can facilitate and enhance cross-cultural dialogue, understanding and collaboration.

In this essay, we compare a developing nation (Ghana) and a post-conflict nation (Sierra Leone) to deepen and complicate our understandingsof an emerging pan-African phenomenon—African roots tourism—and itsattendant possibilities, limitations, and ambiguities. We consider how thesecomplimentary and conflicting interests, beliefs, and practices converge toshape novel modes of pilgrimage, nationhood, and transnational dialogue.In the sections that follow, we work toward two general objectives: first,we analyze the context wherein Africanness has been deployed as an instruct-ive model of counter-globalism7, the considerable geopolitical stakes involvedin these deployments, along with the countervailing forces of conservativ-ism, reformism and radical transformation that are inherent therein. And,second, we offer a corrective to scholarly overemphasis on divergence anddissonance between Africans and African Americans by providing equallyinstructive examples of affinity and cooperation.

Roots as a Postmodern Problematic

The metaphor of roots as imagined ancestral homeland has been a sourceof intense sociopolitical struggle (Malcolm X 1967; Thelwell 2003) andconsiderable scholarly scrutiny (Brown 2005; Bruner 1996; Campbell 2006;Clarke 1992; Clarke 2004; Ebron 1999; Finley 2001; Gaines 1999, 2006;Hartman 2002, 2007; Hasty 2002; Holsey 2008; Lake 1995; Matory 1999;Osei-Tutu 2002). Much of the scholarly scepticism is informed by post-modern thought and falls under the rubric of anti-essentialism (Appiah 1993;Gilroy 1993). At the core of postmodern critiques of roots-as-identity is

6. i.e., a person of high social standing, a wealthy person.7. In using “counter-globalism”, we do not suggest that all Africans or African

American roots travelers are consciously reacting to globalization. Althoughsome within these respective groups do explicitly shape culturalist responses toglobal capital and its attendant potentialities and woes, our point is that globalconsequences and implications do not necessarily require that itinerant black dias-poran and local African actors possess explicit knowledge of these outcomes.



a conviction that sodalities based on race or geography are at best, exclusiv-ist and, at worst, racist. Moreover, according to these critics, the “roots”metaphor indexes subjectivities that presuppose discrete, bounded, and time-less notions of personhood. Accordingly, these scholars argue, “rooted”identities typically lack particularity and ignore the interplay of historicaland political contingencies, promulgating un-nuanced generalizations of selfand others.

A related critique is that the roots-as-identity trope reduces “the home-land” to an originary site with no socio-historical dynamic of its own—aside from its role in diffusing peoples and cultures to other places. Home-lands, in other words, are relegated to the past and to a site elsewhere, whileits diasporas are located in the present. Challenging the notion that thearrows of historical change and spatial dynamism are unidirectional, Matory(1999) shows how the diaspora, Brazilian free blacks and recaptives8 inLagos, Nigeria, was the chief architect of its homeland. This ironic exam-ple shows that discourses and practices that fix Africa in a remote andtimeless past are, from an empirical standpoint, untenable9.

The Dialectics of Brutality and Dignity

The idea and pursuit of African roots are dialectical manifestations of bothbrutal ascriptions and defiant self-fashionings. Or, more accurately, brutal-ity and defiance demarcate the limits within which these dialectical strugglesare staged. During the transatlantic slave trade, perhaps over one hundredmillion Africans were killed or captured by European slave-traders and theirAfrican collaborators. Scholars estimate that the number of Africans wholanded in the Americas—those who survived capture and the subsequentMiddle Passage—falls between nine and twenty million (Curtin 1969;Inikori 1976; Inikori & Engerman 1992; Lovejoy 1983). The triangularcirculation of Africans, African technologies, African resources, rum, guns,steel, sugar, salt, gold, textiles, and so on, linked the two hemispheres innew and enduring ways; moreover, this horrific event has created globalconsequences—social, political, economic and cultural—that are being reck-oned with today.

One such consequence is the idea that there was place called “Africa”inhabited by an inferior race of people called “Africans” (Campbell 2006:10-11). In the New World, the enslaved victims of this “enterprise” gradu-ally, and to varying degrees, came to see themselves as “Africans”, as theirdirect knowledge of their ancestral lands declined over time and space.

8. Africans redeemed from slave vessels by the British Navy following the abolish-ment of the slave trade (1807) in the United Kingdom.

9. That is not to say that we should dismiss self-presentations that evoke timeless-ness; rather, we should be attentive to the purposes and meanings for which theseidentity constructions are formulated and asserted.



Oral histories, historical “memory”, print media, rumor, linguistic and cul-tural self-segregation, and interaction between African creoles10 and newlyarrived enslaved Africans are just a few factors guaranteeing the ongoing,dynamic interface of these re-imagined self-identities. Sierra Leone, in par-ticular, is a key site for understanding this interface, given its early history asa site selected for the return of liberated slaves, and later, for proselytization/civilization of native-born Africans by African diasporans.

Analogous processes in Africa and Afro-western Europe gradually maturedto complement this emerging diasporic sentiment: “Africanness” became asource of solidarity against Euro-colonialism. These processes coalesced,albeit imperfectly, while maintaining their respective internal complexities,to foster among some Africans and African diasporans a sense of universalstruggle against black subordination. With this in mind, we turn to what wefeel is a contemporary example of this phenomenon—African roots tourism.

Although derivative of these past processes, we do not claim that thecontemporary discourses and practices we analyze are perennial reproduc-tions of the past. Rather, we emphasize that Africanness—what Africa isand what it means to be African—is constantly deployed, contested, andrevaluated within and outside the imagined, elastic boundaries of its refer-ent—Africa. Nor do we claim that these discourses and practices are exam-ples of “globalization gone wild” (Bruner 2001). Rather, we assert that Africanroots tourism is a product of a complex array of self-interested, if unequallyempowered, actors, transnational solidarity networks (pan-Africanist, BlackNationalist, Afrocentrist), technologies (Internet, cell phones, commercialjetliners, polymerase chain reaction) and structural enablers/constraints (globalcapital, non-governmental agencies, civil society) of varying scale (local,regional, continental, and global). In the subsequent sections, we highlightthe role that two particular nations—Ghana and Sierra Leone—play in thiscontemporary discourse and practice around Africanness.

Sierra Leone: Back to Africa

Settled in the late 1790s by a few hundred “Black Poor” from Englandand freed blacks who fought with the British during the American War ofIndependence, Sierra Leone has long been significant for “generations ofAfrican Americans struggling to make sense of their relationship to Africa”(Campbell 2006: 16). After the British abolished the capture and sale ofAfrican people as slaves in 1807, the British navy intercepted slave ships,and sent the “human cargo” to live in Sierra Leone. Today, the descendants

10. i.e., enslaved Africans born in the Americas. The nightmarish journey acrossthe Atlantic, generations of creolization in the North America and African bloodspilt (metaphorically and literally) on North American soil would eventually leadto a rival notion of self-hood—African American (MINTZ & PRICE 1992).



of these tens of thousands of “recaptives” call themselves Krio, and countvarious groups—Yoruba, Igbo, Kongo—among their ancestors.

The circulation of black people among continents continued to character-ize Sierra Leone throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Duringthe 1810s African Americans began traveling to Sierra Leone, seeking to savesouls and civilize the fledgling nation. And, reversing this traffic, native-born Sierra Leoneans seeking Western education, journeyed to WesternEurope and the US11. Some scholars have argued that, during the 19th cen-tury, Freetown served as the birthplace for “political nationalism” andconscious Africanism (Hair 1967: 526). One pivotal figure that embodiedthis transnational movement and the origin of pan-African ideals is EdwardWilmot Blyden. Born on the Caribbean island of St Thomas in 1832 toIgbo parents, Blyden emigrated to Liberia in 1851, and later settled in SierraLeone in 1871. While in West Africa, he vociferously opposed Europeanrepression and paternalism. In 1872, only a year after he settled in Freetown,he established The Negro newspaper. Regarding the name of the news-paper, Blyden wrote:

“It has been called the ‘Negro’ (if any explanation is necessary) because it is intendedto represent and defend the interest of that peculiar type of humanity known as theNegro with all its affiliated and collected branches whether on this continent orelsewhere. ‘West African’ was considered definite enough, but too exclusive for thecomprehensive intention entertained by the promoters of the scheme, viz: to recog-nize and greet the brotherhood of the race wherever found” (Frenkel 1974: 284-285).

Although Blyden contested (and lost) presidential elections in Liberia,he lived in Sierra Leone for most of his life, eventually dying there in1912. Blyden’s ideas are widely considered to be the precursor to negritudeand pan-African thought; at all stages of his work he championed racialpride among African peoples, a deep love for Africa, and a belief in Africanrenaissance (Frenkel 1974).

Athens of West Africa

Into the 20th century, Sierra Leone, and Freetown, in particular, was a bea-con for African renaissance. The city’s Fourah Bay College attracted stu-dents from all over West Africa, and contributed to Freetown’s reputationas the “Athens of West Africa”. Despite a gloried history of resistance andanti-imperialism, Sierra Leone, unlike in other parts of West Africa, hadan anti-colonial movement limited in its scope and popular appeal, even asit resulted in the withdrawal of British colonial rule in 1961 (Braithwaite

11. It is important to note that movement among West African states was also com-mon during these periods (THORNTON 1998).



1962). Three decades of relative peace were followed by a rebel insurgencyin 1991 which sought to re-balance the effects of decades of post-colonialgraft and uneven distribution of resources.

Post-conflict Reconstruction through Tourism

Five years ago, Sierra Leone emerged from that ten-year civil war that dis-placed nearly half of its five million people. Characterized by most Westernand African media as a rebel war without a cause, the country has struggledto rebuild its economy, its infrastructure, and a collective sense of stability.In addition to extracting natural resources like diamonds, gold and bauxite,the government and foreign investors have focused on reviving SierraLeone’s nearly defunct tourist industry. As the government grapples withdeveloping the infrastructure necessary to entice Europeans to Freetown’sbeaches, or the hills of Kabala, investors and outsiders have touted the“value of roots” and its potential for infusing foreign currency into SierraLeone’s economy (African Investor 2007: 80). Sierra Leone claims a “direct”connection to African Americans in the southeastern US, citing anthropologi-cal evidence of southern blacks’ descent from the rice-growing Mende peo-ple of Sierra Leone (ibid.). With the growing popularity of genetic ancestrytesting among black Americans, and with 30-40 % of DNA tests indicatingMende and Temne ancestry, Sierra Leone expects an increased number ofAfrican American roots travelers (Bolnick et al. 2007)12.

Direct Roots and Homecomings

More recently, new agendas on both sides of the Atlantic motivated a thirdwave of homecomings. Sierra Leoneans and African Americans have clam-ored for demonstrable, specific, and direct links between Sierra Leone andthe US, reflecting a desire for interaction and collaboration. Joseph Opala,an American anthropologist who has worked in Sierra Leone since the1970s, described his role in mediating the mutual interest and curiosityamong Sierra Leoneans and African Americans with links to Sierra Leone:

12. Ghana’s official government website <www.touringghana.com> outlines a ten-point plan, the Joseph Project, to deepen ties between “homelanders” and “dias-porans”. Point ten involves developing a genetic database that would “establishfor every returnee/pilgrim interested, a personal report on his/her antecedents”that would facilitate “visits to the villages of the[ir] ancestors”. There are prob-lems with using DNA as a definitive “answer” to questions about ancestry. Fora more detailed discussion of the science informing these tests, and some of thehistorical questions these tests raise, see BENTON (2006) and DUSTER (2006).



“My greatest pleasure [...] was sharing my historical findings with Sierra Leoneans[...] when I first announced that had I traced some of the slaves taken away fromSierra Leone to a particular place in America, people were ecstatic. Sierra Leone-ans never dreamed of finding their lost family, and the response was so strong I wastaken aback. Suddenly, every newspaper and radio station in the country wanted tointerview me, and many schools and community groups wanted me to speak. Every-where I went the questions tumbled out: How did you trace the slaves? Where werethey taken? Why were they taken there? What are their descendants like today?”

The first set of the connections were made through “Gullah home-comings”, with the first in 1989, and a second one in 1997. The Gullahpeople are the African Americans who live in coastal South Carolina andGeorgia today, the descendants of the rice-growing Africans brought fromSierra Leone and other parts of the Rice Coast13. They live in what iscalled South Carolina’s low country, on the southern coast of the state, andon the sea islands off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia. Thoughlinguists and anthropologists have questioned the extent to which the lin-guistic and cultural links between Africa and North America have beenpreserved, the group is known for having preserved more of their Africanlanguage and culture than any other black community in the US.

According to Opala, who, aside from Lorenzo Dow Turner14, helped tomake these connections more widely known, each homecoming has beenmore specific than the last, reflecting the increasing knowledge producedabout the connection between Gullah and West African culture by scholarsworking in the Atlantic region. The first reunion, or homecoming, whichoccurred in 1989, involved Gullah leaders interested in their links to SierraLeone, but with no known personal connection to that country. The MoranFamily Homecoming in 1997 involved a family from coastal Georgia thathad preserved a song in Mende from a specific village, passing it down fortwo hundred years. But what would eventually be called Priscilla’s Home-coming (2005)15 was the most specific. Records collected in Sierra Leoneand the US linked a US family to a girl named Priscilla, who was enslavedand transported to the US from Bunce Island, Sierra Leone, in 1756.

In July 2003, having learned of this link from Opala, the governmentof Sierra Leone sent an invitation letter to Thomalind Martin Polite askingher to participate in a “homecoming” ceremony in the country:

“There is every reason to believe that your ancestor, Priscilla, came from our countryand that Sierra Leone is your ancestral home [...]. [We] can assure you that your

13. The rice coast (or grain coast) complex consisted of Liberia, Sierra Leone, GuineaConakry, Guinea Bissau, Senegal and Gambia (CARNEY 2001).

14. Turner (b. August 21, 1890 - d. 1972) was an African American linguist whowas the first to suggest and document similarities between West African langua-ges and Gullah dialect.

15. Among the sponsors for Priscilla’s Homecoming were: Sierra Leone’s Ministryof Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Tourism and Culture, and the National TouristBoard, the US Embassy, and the Catholic Archdiocese of Sierra Leone. Therewere also numerous sponsors in South Carolina and Rhode Island.



visit will be well publicized here [...] and that thousands of our people will beanxious to greet you, their long-lost family come home from South Carolina.”

Polite was, indeed, welcomed with great fanfare and a series of officialceremonies. During her visit, she also traveled to Bunce Island. Observersposted their travelogues online16, along with a series of multimedia toolsfor use by the interested public. A film about Polite’s journey to SierraLeone is currently in production.

Ghana: The “Black Mecca”

During the post-Reconstruction era, which many scholars assert was thenadir of white racial terror in the US, Chief Alfred Sam, a Gold Coast(Ghana) businessman, devised a plan to resettle several hundred “Negroes”at Salt Pond, in what is now the Central Region of Ghana. In 1914, ChiefSam set sail from Norfolk, Virginia with sixty black American emigrants,mostly from the Midwestern state of Oklahoma17. The propagandist forChief Sam’s ambitious program was Reverend Orishatuke Faduma, a SierraLeonean scholar-activist of Yoruba descent. Faduma expressed his unwa-vering support for black repatriation and believed that black North Ameri-cans’ desire to “return” to Africa was not simply a reaction to whiteoppression: “There was always a feeling among Negroes in the New Worldto return to Africa, their mother land” (Langley 1973: 71). For reasonsranging from poor organization and planning to strong opposition fromBritish colonial officials, Chief Sam’s “Back-to-Africa” scheme was a com-plete failure. He, nevertheless, inspired or, at least, foretold other “repatria-tion” efforts—including those of the Jamaican Marcus Garvey, who carriedout a similar scheme on a much grander scale18.

16. To see the travelogue and information about Polite’s journey, visit the followingwebsites: <http://www.yale.edu/glc/priscilla/index.htm> and <http://www.africanaheritage.com/Priscillas_Homecoming.asp>. Both websites focus on the Pris-cilla’s life and how the connection between Thomalind Polite and the young girlwas made. They also highlight, to varying extents, the events that took placeduring the reunion.

17. While it is well-known that some white Americans supported and even spear-headed “back to Africa” movements, the movement was also a threat to the racialstatus quo and, therefore, posed great danger for blacks. A newspaper editorialwritten in 1912, “African Recruiter Lynching”, explained the deadly consequen-ces: “We do not know the circumstances surrounding the death of this Negroother than the one fact that he was working among his own people endeavoringto get a sufficient number of them to go to Africa [...] [W]hite farmers in thecommunity, who were depending on these Negroes to gather their crops, becameangered and decided to nip the movement in the bud by lynching the leader [...]the pitiful part about it is that this lynching, as all others, will go unnoticed bythe state and government authorities” (GINZBURG 1988).

18. Marcus Garvey was likely acquainted with Chief Alfred Sam. Garvey’s mentor,Duse Mohamed Ali, was publicly skeptical of Chief Sam’s Back-to-Africascheme (LANGLEY 1973).



Less than fifty years later, Ghana has become the “Black Mecca” forAfrican American sojourners to Africa, a distinction it has held since it wonits independence from Britain in 195719. At that time, Kwame Nkrumah,Ghana’s first head of State, encouraged American and Caribbean blacks torelocate to Ghana and contribute their resources, professional training, andtechnical experience to the development of Africa. Hundreds of AfricanAmericans heeded his call and took up residence in Ghana. Some of these“returnees” played an important role in the early years of Ghana’s nationbuilding project (Gaines 1999, 2006). After Nkrumah was overthrown in1966, virtually all the African Americans in Ghana either left voluntarilyor were expelled by the military regime for “national security” reasons.

Ironically, the New Patriotic Party (NPP), which had expressed little inter-est in Nkrumah’s pan-Africanist agenda, now promotes deepening relation-ships between African Americans and Ghanaians. Moving to put theirunique stamp on this effort, the regime set up the Ministry of Tourism andDiaspora Relations, which is tasked with, among other things, strengtheningthe familial bonds between these two groups. Unlike in the Nkrumah era,none of the recent programs encourage African Americans to resettle inGhana. Instead, they focus primarily on African Americans as sources oftourist revenue rather than as potential citizens20.

“Ghana@50: Lets All Celebrate!”

Ghana is celebrated by its “development partners”, and self-promoted byGhanaian elites, as a model African nation. On 6 March 2007, the Ghanaiangovernment embarked upon an ambitious program of celebrations to com-memorate the 50th anniversary of its independence and to further solidifyits status as the “gateway to Africa”. The official theme for the events was“Championing African Excellence”. The celebratory mood was encouragedby a theme song which had as its refrain, “Ghana@50: Lets All Celebrate!”Yet, the purpose, intent and even the necessity of celebrating Ghana’sGolden Jubilee was debated throughout the nation (Akyeampong & Aikins2008). One widely publicized debate21 became so acrimonious that the

19. Ghana receives over 10,000 African American visitors annually, more than anyother African nation.

20. Obetsebi-Lamptey explained to a mostly African American audience in Ghana:“We’re not saying everybody should get up and relocate back in Africa. No,you built the country over there—you built the wealth over there. Why shouldyou give it up? You should use that wealth over there and bring some of itback here to use it to build up here” (COMMANDER 2007).

21. Even I (Benton), based in Sierra Leone during the celebration, heard the debatesamong Ghanaians on BBC Africa, and participated in discussions with SierraLeoneans. Ghanaians in Sierra Leone openly displayed their interest in the cele-brations. For example, I attended a four-day workshop led by a Ghanaian phy-sician who, on each day, wore a suit sewn with as many different 50-year



immediate past president of Ghana, Jerry Rawlings, refused to participate inofficially sponsored commemoration celebrations (Obeng 2007: 15). Rawl-ings criticized the incumbent New Patriotic Party (NPP) on the followingcounts: it was using the celebrations to mask their “witchhunting”22, malfea-sance and incompetence; the celebrations did not properly acknowledge thecontributions of his regime, the National Democratic Convention (NDC); andthe impoverished status of the “average” Ghanaian made the celebration asham. The NPP countered that their (NPP) regime had ushered in unprece-dented levels of peace, stability and prosperity and the celebrations shouldbe observed in the spirit of national unity and reconciliation. Public debateoften followed party lines, but the events were generally well attended,despite numerous complaints about poor organization. Although there weredivergent opinions about the utility, objectives and appropriateness of thecelebrations, most conceded that fifty years of independence was an impor-tant moment to reflect on the nation’s postcolonial accomplishments, fail-ures, and future aims.

The commemorative events included lectures by intellectuals, politiciansand traditional authorities; beach parties, parades and cultural performances;and gospel, hiplife (Ghanian rap/hiphop music), reggae and highlife con-certs. In addition, the government developed specific programs to promoteand attract roots tourism, with a special emphasis on black North Americancultural tourists: the Emancipation Day23 observance of the 200th anniver-sary of the abolishment of the slave trade by Britain; PANAFEST24, a biennialevent that promotes global black unity through the celebration of pan-African culture and heritage; and the Joseph Project, a one-time event spear-headed by Jake Obetsebi-Lamptey, then the Minister of Tourism and Dias-poran Relations aimed at reconciling the emotional, social and material gulfbetween Ghanaians and black/African diasporans.

celebration commemorative fabric patterns. Each morning, the Sierra Leoneanparticipants would comment on his outfit and discuss the celebrations, as reportedon the BBC.

22. From Rawlings’s point of view, the accusation of “witch-hunting” is the mostdamning—his wife is currently on trial for “willfully causing financial loss tothe state”, a criminal offense under Ghanaian law (GHANAWEB 2006).

23. Emancipation Day is an annual event in Ghana, but targets diasporan pilgrimsrather than Ghanaian citizens. In Sierra Leone it is considered, by some SierraLeoneans, a part of Sierra Leone’s history worthy of celebration. The UKwanted to allot 22 million pounds to commemorate the bicentennial, but Free-town’s mayor felt the money would be better spent helping those who experi-enced the greatest loss because of the slave trade, i.e. Africans living on thewest coast of Africa. City officials suggested changing the British street namesin downtown Freetown to reflect African contributions to abolition of the slavetrade.

24. Pan-African Historical Theatre Festival.



“We Are not Tourists”: Reconciling Foreignness, Capitalismand Affective Ties to “Home”

Roots travelers find many different routes to the “Motherland”. PaullaEbron has described how corporate entities like Heineken and McDonaldsco-opted the tropes of “roots”, “return” and “pilgrimage” in pursuit of profit.She suggests, however, that these instances of corporate capitalism are notnecessarily antithetical to the aims of “authentic” pan-African identity con-struction. These identity constructions, she argues, are not the same as inthe previous era of black American radicalism; nor are they entirely new.Whereas the black revolutionaries of the 1960s offered radical critiques ofimperialism, capitalism and structural racism, contemporary African rootspilgrims are as likely to rely on more conservative tropes of individualismand personal responsibility. The relatively conservative posture of somemodern-day African roots travelers makes the marriage between global capi-tal and pan-African desire viable—a prospect that would have been untena-ble forty years ago.

Saidiya Hartman tracks a different but related trajectory for black dias-poran pilgrimages to Africa that gradually shifts from the idealism of the1960s to a more sober outlook in the 1990s:

“In the sixties it was still possible to believe that the past could be left behindbecause it appeared as though the future, finally, had arrived; whereas in my agethe impress of racism and colonialism seemed nearly indestructible. Mine was notthe age of romance. The Eden of Ghana had vanished long before I ever arrived”(Hartman 2007: 37)

She adds that “unlike the scores of black tourists who, motivated byAlex Haley’s Roots, [she] had traveled to Ghana and other parts of WestAfrica to reclaim their African patrimony. For [her], the rupture was thestory” (ibid.: 42). We are wary of analyses which suggest that motivationsfor return can be easily schematized or dismissed as “romanticism”; Ebronand Hartman capture nicely the shifting ground on which diasporan Africandesires for return are constantly reshaped.

Some black Americans travel to Africa with Afrocentric tour groupsthat cater to their cultural-political agendas. The Ghana Roots Culture andRepatriation Tour, for example, is a diasporan African grassroots initiativesponsored by the Africa for the Africans Tours and Investments Group(AFTA)25. AFTA targets and attracts a broad range of clientele including medi-cal doctors, Afrocentric scholars, blue collar workers, entrepreneurs and retir-ees. The travelers are generally working—to middle-class, college-educatedand earn, on average, $35,000-$80,00026. The AFTA tours are expensive byGhanaian standards; a ten-day excursion in 2008 cost $2,950. For travelers

25. <http://africafortheafricans.org/index.php>.26. I thank Bomani Tyehimba, co-founder of AFTA, for these statistics.



from the “western” world, the relative strength of western currency can beof considerable economic advantage in “developing” nations. But these excur-sions can represent a significant financial sacrifice for many middle andworking class black Americans.

The organization aims to foster deep, enduring ties between continentaland diasporan Africans by promoting pan-African (black) nationalism, Africaninvestment, and “repatriation” to the “motherland”. The program’s bro-chure states: “Our mission is to reconnect our people with the motherland.Our main tool [...] is through tours. Organized tours have proven to bethe most effective way to dispel the myths and negative propaganda thatkeeps Africa [and its diaspora] divided.” The “divide” between AfricanAmericans and Africans has received modest public notoriety due to a spateof articles appearing in US newspapers and magazines from the early 1990son (Boorstein 2001; Polgreen 2005; Rimer & Arenson 2004; Roberts 2005;Washington 1992; Zachary 2001). If the frequent, negative media portrayalof Africans and African Americans are any indication, this perspective aboutnegative propaganda is warranted27. Nevertheless, it is a mistake to reduceall instances of divergence to propaganda; some of these differences resultfrom the peculiar agendas and outlooks of the respective communities.

While in Ghana, the AFTA coordinators outlined an ambitious itinerarythat had many participants struggling to keep up: a two-day conferencedesigned to encourage investment in Africa; a video screening aimed atblack/African consciousness raising; excursions to several slave castles andforts dotting Ghana’s coastline and to Fihankra28, a diasporan African town-ship in the Eastern Region’s Akwamu Traditional Area. During the confer-ence, participants discussed strategies to liberate Africa and Africans in thediaspora, acquiring land, slavery reparations and repatriation. Many AfricanAmericans expressed a desire to return “home” and help Africa29.

A Ghanaian presenter, Kwame Osei, asked black diasporans to “think ofthemselves as Africans”. He complained that “non-Africans are dominatingour economy”, and that they [the non-Africans] were “not interested in emanci-pation” but, “exploitation”. Osei urged his predominantly African Americanaudience to “use your expertise to take back Africa”30. AFTA literature

27. Traveling throughout Africa, I (Benton) was asked whether I am a “nigga” fromthe “ghetto” or if I ever fear for my life (because there are so many guns andso much gang violence in America); in the US, upon hearing about my work inAfrica, I often hear comments about how “hard it must be” to “see so muchpoverty and death”. HUNTER-GAULT (2006) writes against these negative stereo-types about Africans, but she is in the minority.

28. Fihankra is an Akan adinkra symbol meaning the safety/stability/unity of thehome.

29. Currently, there is no reliable estimate of African American expatriates livingin Ghana, but unofficial estimates range from 1,000-5,000. The number is proba-bly closer to 1,000.

30. Osei’s outlook is more militant than Ghanaian officials or the “typical”Ghanaian. I (Shabazz) think, however, that it is important that Osei’s views aregiven voice. Black radical thought in Ghana is rarely, if ever, the subject of



echoes this sentiment: “The investment portion of the tour is designed topromote a self-sufficient Africa by connecting the skills and resources ofAfricans in the Diaspora with projects, investment opportunities and like-minded brothers and sisters on the continent.” The organizers invoke a senseof urgency: “In order for Africans to thrive and survive the war being wagedagainst us globally, we must build a home base of power in Africa. Weare at a critical stage in our existence; its Repatriation and Pan-Africanismor perish.” Here, the organizers deploy warfare idiom with great effect,communicating the urgent need for collective black/African struggle, at oncephysical, mental, and spiritual.

The Daily Graphic, the paper of record in Ghana, published an articleentitled, “Reject the Leadership Tourists” (Abbas 2007: 15). The articlewarns against supporting presidential aspirants who are “out of touch withthe people” and lack a substantive relationship with their constituents. Thearticle shows that the word “tourist” may have, for Ghanaians, the samenegative connotation—that of fleetingness, or lack of intimacy with localrealities and local people—for black diasporan sojourners to Africa. As aprominent female member of the black American expatriate community inGhana put it, African American roots travelers have all have made a con-scious decision to identify both politically and culturally with Africa, whereasthe “typical” tourist might not.

Jasmyne Cannick, like many other roots travelers we talked to, expresseda sentiment that supports this claim. In an interview on National Public Radioabout her May 2007 trip to Sierra Leone with actor, Isaiah Washington31,Jasmyne remarked:

“Well, anytime you travel to the Motherland, you have to go with a purpose.Isaiah’s purpose in going was to check on the school that he’s building in one ofSierra Leone’s villages, Njalakendema. My reason for going [...] [is] because Iwanted to go back home, and get in touch with my people. And that was the mostliberating experience I’ve ever had in my entire life.”

Yemi a thirty-something year-old dreadlocked African American attor-ney from Atlanta, Georgia, describes some challenges she faced trying toreconcile Ghanaian ascriptions of her foreignness with her own feelings ofbelonging during her trip to Ghana with the AFTA tour group:

scholarly analysis and critique and such race-conscious Ghanaians are the obvi-ous allies of African American roots tourists. Ghanaian sentiments about pan-African cooperation need not be informed by “black militancy”, however; other-wise apolitical university students have, on several occasions, complained to methat African Americans “don’t do enough to help Africa”.

31. Isaiah Washington one of the best-known celebrities who has a DNA ancestrylink to Sierra Leone, and in particular, to the Mende ethnic group. He is alsoone of the few who have initiated several visible projects there, and continuesto contribute to social service initiatives, and publicize these contributions.



“I think that probably the thing that surprised me most in my experience here isthat there were a lot of Ghanaians that perceived me as more like a European, aregular tourist. I didn’t necessarily expect them to embrace me as if I were familyper se, at least not all of them across the board, but I was surprised that they wouldgo as so far as to view me the same as the European or Caucasian American [...]despite the fact that before I opened my mouth, I looked like any other African orRastafarian [chuckles] walking the streets.”

Yemi was especially disappointed when Ghanaians called her “oburoni”(usually translated as “white person” or foreigner)32. The feeling of beingtreated as a foreigner and, as several African American sojourners put it, like“a walking dollar bill”, is a common sentiment among African Americans I(Shabazz) have interviewed. Some deeply resent this perceived treatment,while others express a sense of humor about it. And, of course, some AfricanAmericans concede that they can understand the local Ghanaian perspec-tive. Traveling on private buses, walking around town with cameras andbulging backpacks, and toting bottled water, all mark one as a “tourist”,despite protestations to the contrary.

Officials from the Sierra Leone tourism agency and the World Bank dolittle to contradict the idea that they are deeply invested in attracting AfricanAmerican dollars. They, too, highlight the potentially lucrative role of rootstourism in their development portfolios. According to an article on Africantourism in the African Investor magazine (2007: 80): “Approximately 36 mil-lion Americans have African descent, 43 % of whom have some college orbachelor’s degree. ‘Niche marketing numbers don’t get any better thanthis’, says the World Bank report. The World Bank believes about fifteenmillion African Americans could be appropriately targeted with an informa-tion campaign on Bunce Island and motivated to visit”.

African Americans interviewed in Ghana frequently cite racial oppres-sion and de-facto second-class citizenship in the US as key motivations fortraveling to Africa. They often told me (Shabazz) that they came to Ghanawith the hopes of making or reinforcing a spiritual “connection” with Africaand, possibly, “repatriating” at a later date. And as these two women’saccounts convey, the sense of unofficial exile and the concomitant reactionagainst US white racism is not the whole story—they also describe a deeplyfelt affinity with Africa and Africans.

32. Numerous articles discuss the oburoni (sometimes spelled obruni) controversy(COATES 2006; HARTMAN 2007; HASTY 2002). During the Ghana@50 celebrationsthe Ghanaian government launched a campaign to “educate” Ghanaians on AfricanAmerican distaste for the term. The campaign encouraged Ghanaians to greetAfrican Americans with the phrase akwaaba (Akan, “welcome”) anyemi (Ga,“sibling”). Aside from a press conference and several akwaaba anyemi bannersscattered throughout Accra, there was little effort to reinforce the program. Thisand the reshuffling at the Ministry of Tourism and Diasporan Relations, meantthat the “welcome sibling” campaign was shortlived and forgettable (althoughwell-intended).



Fihankra: a Way Back Home

In 1994, the Ghana House of Chiefs, many other traditional authorities fromGhana, Nigeria, Togo and Ivory Coast, and participants from the Africandiaspora, assembled to atone for the role of African chiefs in the transatlan-tic slave trade. The most important symbol of this atonement process wasthe purification of an animal skin and carved wooden stool. The stool isemblematic of chiefly authority among many ethnic groups in southernGhana, most notably the Akan. Likewise, a ritually prepared animal skinhas a consonant function for many of Ghana’s northern groups.

The purification rites culminated with the appointment of Nana KwadwoOluwale Akpan, a diasporan African from Detroit, Michigan, as the custo-dian of the stool and skin. In 1997, Nana Akpan was nominated andappointed the Fihankrahene (chief of Fihankra), the sacred caretaker of30,000 acres of stool-land33 ceded to the group by the Akwamu traditionalrulers and elders34. The allotment of land was a vital component of atone-ment and of the “reintegration” of diasporan Africans into African society.Lastly, Nana Akpan was designated as the first African American memberof the Ghana House of Chiefs.

The Afro-politics of Style

Each year, Fihankra receives hundreds of African diasporan roots travelershoping to live and/or invest in Africa. When the 40-strong AFTA grouptraveled to the Akwamu traditional area to see the Fihankra site, most mem-bers of the group displayed “coiffure politics”35 or adhered to a looselydefined set of sartorial expressions paramount to an Afrocentric ethos: “nat-ural” hair, or hair that has not been straightened with chemicals or hot metalcombs; African jewelry, especially beads, cowrie shells or the ankh, theancient Egyptian symbol of life; and brightly colored African shirts ort-shirts with Afrocentric messages:

33. Land controlled by a traditional ruler.34. According to the Ghanaian historian Akosua PERBI (2006), the Akwamu were

prolific slave traders: “Of all the southern states of Ghana, the Akwamu stateearned the greatest notoriety for slave raiding and kidnapping.”

35. One enduring legacy of white supremacy and black subordination in the USare subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle messages about aesthetic preferences for“white” phenotypes, including “straight” hair. The African American rhythmand blues singer, Indie Arie, and the Senegalese rapper, Akon, scored a hit singleon the topic. The lyrics capture the essence of coiffure politics nicely: “Goodhair means curls and waves/Bad hair means you look like a slave/At the turnof the century/It’s time for us to redefine who we be/You can shave it off likea South African beauty/Or get in on lock like Bob Marley/You can rock it straightlike Oprah Winfrey/ If its not what’s on your head/It’s what’s underneath”(ARIE 2006).



“Advantages of Melanin”“Black to Our Roots”“Sankofa”36

“Son of a Field Negro”“Bring Back Black”

Or the names and images of (exclusively male) iconic figures:

“Fred Hampton”37

“Nat Turner”38

“Huey Newton”39

“Malcolm X”“Kwame Nkrumah”

Nana Akpan, the African American Fihankrahene (paramount chief ofthe Fihankra township), delivered a brief, informal speech to AFTA and helda question-and-answer session. The Fihankra community, he stressed, isreserved for blacks “born in the Diaspora as a direct result of the transatlan-tic slave trade”; a “historical community” with a “historical purpose”. Healso explained that the community began with a “slavery apology ceremony”and that Fihankra aims to “contribute to reconstructing Africa” and “pro-mote the reintegration of Africa with its diaspora”. This reintegrationwould be spearheaded by diasporan Africans who had “acquired specificskills”. Nana Akpan also announced an upcoming conference with thetheme “A way back home”, to be sponsored by the Fihankra movement.Stressing that Africa is “home”, he urged the group to not view themselvesas “regular tourists”40. Fihankra is by any standards in innovative experi-ment; it draws upon black diasporan and continental African notions ofmorality and restitution to establish a neo-“traditional” institution which aimsto bridge the political, economic and socio-cultural divide between thesetwo respective groups.

36. Lit. “return, go, take”. Sank$fa (often anglicized as “Sankofa”) is an Akanadinkra symbol frequently glossed as “return to your (African cultural) roots”.

37. Fred Hampton was the young, charismatic chairman of the Black Panther Party’sIllinois chapter. In 1969, an African American US government informantdrugged Hampton; the Chicago police department and US federal agents killedHampton while he was sleeping.

38. Nat Turner, in 1831, led the largest slave revolt in antebellum SouthernUnited States.

39. Huey Newton and Bobby Seale co-founded the Black Panther Party in 1966, inOakland, California.

40. During the write-up of this essay, Nana Kwadwo Akpan died unexpectedly inTogo. Fihankra officials have canceled the “A way back home” conference.



Jasmyne Goes to Sierra Leone... and Other Blog Tales

This section focuses on data collected from weblogs that featured discussionabout African Americans’ travel to Sierra Leone during my (Benton) eight-een months’ fieldwork there. The interchange between Africans and AfricanAmericans through internet technologies highlights another way that thesegroups engage in dialogue and how they assert, contest, and generally, dis-cuss Africanness in public forums. During my fieldwork, I (Benton) regu-larly read the weblog of Jasmyne Cannick, an African American journalistbased in Los Angeles. Her blog focuses primarily issues of race, genderand sexuality in American culture, and her unabashed accounts of being alesbian of African descent are read by dozens of people daily.

In late May 2007, Jasmyne alerted her readers that she had been invitedby actor Isaiah Washington to accompany him on and document an upcom-ing trip to Sierra Leone. At the time, Isaiah Washington was building aprimary school in Bo District, because of his genetic ties to the area; hismaternal, or mitochondrial DNA, had matched a Mende sample in a commer-cial DNA database. During her trip with Washington, Jasmyne uploadedpictures of the sites she visited, including pictures of her trip to BunceIsland slave castle. Her comments focused on her “return”. She urgedothers of African descent to do the same. Her narrative also reveals an explicitdesire to help Sierra Leoneans to improve their life conditions, and a deeplyfelt affinity for the people she encountered on her trip:

“It’s taken me a week to get it together to write about my trip partly because I amstill playing catch up but mostly because I am still processing everything I sawand did over there and all of the wonderful people that I met.I realize now what is important and what we all need to be fighting for are povertyand not just poverty in America, poverty around the world, more importantly inAfrica, where much of the continent is still underdeveloped and still very muchexploited, and sometimes by our own.Going to Sierra Leone changed my life and my vision of the world and I am gratefulfor the opportunity. I will never take food, clean running water, paved roads, elec-tricity, and shelter for granted again in my life, nor will I be wasteful in my habits.”

In addition to expressing her affinity with the “wonderful people” shemet while she was in Sierra Leone, she implies, too, her place as Americanand African. She wants to live and work in solidarity with the people shemet, while she also acknowledges greater consciousness of the daily hardshipsthat many Sierra Leoneans face. Although many other African Americantravelers (my mother expressed similar feelings about Sierra Leone andGhana, for example) express this sentiment, the weblog—as a forum fordiscussion and dissent—affords us the opportunity to gauge the responsesof others to her story about her journey. Most striking were the ways that(self-identified) Africans who read her blog, reacted to Jasmyne’s visit toSierra Leone:



“I had goosebumps reading this! I am so happy you had such a once in a lifetimeexperience to go to Africa [...]. Being an African myself, I agree a lot of AfricanAmericans should try to go to Africa and visit. A lot of perspectives and prejuidices[sic] will be changed. There is so much good one can do with a little effort anddoing away with some taken for granted luxuries we have here in the USA.”

Another “native African” reader, John Akoli, wrote:

“Great thread, as a native African myself, it is always good to read how AfricanAmerican’s [sic] feel when they go to the continent. Mr. Washington is doinggreat things, and hopefully God will bless him to continue to do so.”

The two “African” responses to Jasmyne’s trip demonstrate the begin-nings of the breadth of potential African-African diasporan relations asimagined by Africans, and which are built on this notion of roots travel.Implied in the two statements here is that, first, there are misconceptionsamong African Americans about Africa, and, second, that visiting Africais one way to debunk these misconceptions and resulting prejudices. In sodoing, they suggest that these misconceptions and prejudices arise from lackof knowledge, knowledge which would usually be grounded in the experi-ence of “being there”. The authors of these statements, therefore, tell usthat in completing a journey to Africa, we see things “as they are”. Rootstravelers, then, become conscious of the uneven distribution of resourcesamong the world’s people and how everyone is somehow implicated inthese economic structures (“the continent is [...] very much exploited, andsometimes by our own”). Overall, the authors demonstrate that there areAfricans who acknowledge their desire—if not obligation—for constructive,productive engagements with African Americans. And when AfricanAmericans make positive, affirming journeys to the continent, they some-how demonstrate, too, their commitment to fulfilling similar desires andobligations in the long term.

These types of responses to African American roots-related and philan-thropic sojourns were not unique to Jasmyne’s weblog. One of the (few)tourist sites encouraging travel to Sierra Leone41, featured in its weblog astory about DNA pilgrims, who appear to make up the bulk of roots travelersto Sierra Leone. Okolo, a Sierra Leonean who recently moved back toSierra Leone from the US and the moderator for the site, recounts the storyof Isaiah Washington’s DNA connection to Sierra Leone, as well as newsabout Oprah Winfrey’s own test—which revealed a genetic connection tothe Kpelle of Liberia. At the end of her piece, Okolo notes, “Anyway,what does this mean for Sierra Leone and other African countries? It meansgreat opportunities for greater cooperation between Africans their brothers

41. <visitsierraleone.org>.



and sisters42 scattered around the globe. This is one to follow with greatinterest as we will hear more stories such as those mentioned above in thecoming years and will probably play a huge part in Africa’s tourism industryin years to come”.

Again, Okolo’s reference to “brothers and sisters” suggest kin-like con-nectedness between Sierra Leoneans and Americans of African descent. Italso indicates the potential for constructive collaboration between the twogroups that is rooted in this sense of relatedness. In Okolo’s narrative, thepotential for enhanced collaboration between Sierra Leoneans and AfricanAmericans, however, is mostly realized through tourism (likely because thisis a site dedicated to promoting tourism in Sierra Leone)—and philanthropicefforts. Such a distinction is noteworthy for this discussion, since it seemsthat African Americans, are again recognized in terms of what they contrib-ute materially during their visits to the country. Tourism appears to be anend in and of itself.

Okolo’s entry about Isaiah Washington’s philanthropic efforts elicitednine reader comments. Six comments came from African Americans whohad submitted a DNA sample for ancestry testing and “discovered” geneticlinks to Mende or Temne people, groups that are linked to present-day SierraLeone. Two of the remaining three commenters were Sierra Leoneans whowholeheartedly agreed with the pan-African solidarity message advancedby Okolo. One of these commentators, “Iverson”, noted:

“I am very happy to hear all this good news about my brothers and sisters comingback to their homeland. We need to aware that we are all one from our sharedhistory. I hope that one day all african desendants [sic] will be united as in onenation. Africans You [sic] need to open you your eyes and push away youroppressor. We wanna go home we have been on trail for too long. Every Africanshould be proud to be an african. I love Sierra Leone till I die.”

In addition to acknowledging his diehard nationalism and love for SierraLeone, Iverson also recognizes a “shared history” of Africans on the continent

42. During our dissertation field research in Ghana and Sierra Leone, we often heardGhanaians and Sierra Leoneans refer to both strangers and friends of the sameapproximate generation as “brother” or “sister”. These kinship idioms weredeployed for a variety of purposes ranging from accentuating friendships, to defus-ing potentially violent conflicts, to negotiating fees or prices. Black Americans,especially during the 1960’s, frequently addressed each other as “brother” or“sister”. As MALCOLM X (1967) explained, “We’ve got to change our own mindsabout each other. We have to see each other with new eyes. We have to seeeach other as brothers and sisters. We have to come together with warmth sowe can develop unity and harmony that’s necessary to get this problem solvedourselves” (WILLIAMS 2004: 88). Black consciousness movements and the racismthat these movements reacted against have popularized the notion that black/African people, wherever in the world they might reside, are siblings or cousins.Critics insist that, in the latter instance, these imagined familial ties occlude themany differences, often declared to be unbridgeable, within and between theserespective groups.



and elsewhere. He also points to Africa as the site of return or homecomingfor African Americans. More interestingly, his statement is aspirational intone; Iverson expresses hope for unity between the groups. In his pan-African vision, he urges people of African descent to be proud of theirroots, and use it as common ground for race and roots consciousness (“openyour eyes”) and overcoming oppressive race regimes (“push away youroppressor”). The remaining commenter, a Sierra Leonean living in the stateof Maryland in the US, voiced a different opinion about the utility of African-African American alliances for improving the conditions experienced by thetwo groups. He suggested that Sierra Leoneans “clean their own backyard”before pursuing a relationship with Africans in the diaspora.

These data do not reflect a scientific, randomized study of African-African diaspora relations. They do, however, hint at the range and typesof dialogue that can and do exist about what constitutes an African, and whoshould engage in African struggles. By engaging in these conversations, themembers of these groups participate in an instructive public dialogue inwhich they assert claims about the challenge and value of African ancestryin effecting social change on the continent and in the African diaspora.

Jumping to Forget (and remember) Slavery

As suggested in the other sections, slavery and its commemoration attractsAfrican roots tourism to both Ghana and Sierra Leone. And for obviousreasons: the capture and enslavement of Africans in the West is a key markerin the identity of African Americans. The extent to which slavery shouldbe discussed or commemorated in national development agendas, however,varies within and between Ghana and Sierra Leone.

In her weblog account of her trip to Bunce Island slave castle in SierraLeone, Jasmyne tells her readers: “[...] it’s a life changing experience towalk in the footsteps of your ancestors as they did when they were slavesand to see what they saw [...]”43. For many African American sojournersto Africa, reverence for their enslaved ancestors who survived the MiddlePassage is commemorated through various sacred rituals. Demonstratingthis reverence through libations and prayers offered to the ancestors, forexample, is an essential component of the Afrocentric diasporan socio-politicalconsciousness. Those who perform these libations believe that the sacredumbilical chord with Africa is maintained and actualized through theancestors.

But for many Ghanaian Christians, especially evangelicals, ancestor ven-eration is antithetical to religious faith. Nana, a Ghanaian graduate studentat the University of Ghana, on several occasions told me (Shabazz) that the“ancestors are dead and gone, they can do nothing for you, and it is only

43. <www.jasmynecannick.com>.



through Jesus that we should offer prayers because it is through him thatwe receive salvation”. Similarly, Mensa Otabil, a popular evangelical min-ister in Ghana, opines that African Americans are looking backward whileGhanaians are looking forward. He is critical of what he believes is thetendency of African Americans to romanticize African cultural traditions.“As an African, I consider our inability to renew our culture and move itfrom the definitions of our ancestors to be a major problem. Anyone whotells me to go back to my ancestors does not realize that I am alreadywith my ancestors and I am trying to progress beyond their legacy!” (vanGorder 2008).

The legacy of slavery is pivotal for roots travelers to Ghana who wantto reconnect with Africa. These travelers routinely visit monuments mark-ing the slave trade, monuments that are being marketed by Ghanaian offi-cials for precisely that purpose. For Ghanaians who look to the future withthe same intensity, travelers’ efforts to make sense of what happened andto honor their ancestors is a potential drag (Hartman 2002; Hasty 2002;Holsey 2008).

A British-Ghanaian colleague opined that African Americans are “recol-onizing Ghana just as they did in Sierra Leone and Liberia”. She suggestedthat this “recolonization” was not simply a material one, but also an idea-tional one. In her view, African Americans’ ideas are hegemonic in African-African American dialogue and, in these discussions, African Americans“only want to talk about slavery”. The colleague added, for emphasis, that“there is more to Ghana than slavery!”. Thus, while some black Americanshold the opinion that slavery is not discussed enough in Ghana, some Ghanaiansfeel as if black Americans are preoccupied with the past, with little or noconcern for or knowledge about contemporary Ghanaian challenges. Thisis probably what a Ghanaian acquaintance had in mind when he said (in atone somewhere between exasperation and disdain) that Ghana had “toomuch culture”. Both the official and everyday preoccupation with culturalidentity was, in his view, emotionally taxing and unproductive. Only themost intransigent ideologue would disagree that slavery is the lone eventin Ghana’s history; but what remains unresolved is how to strike a balancebetween the desires and interests that diasporan and continental Africansexpress.

In Sierra Leone, monuments focusing on the slave trade form the corner-stone of efforts attempting to attract roots travel to the still-rebuilding coun-try. There is likely less resistance among Sierra Leoneans to discussingthe legacy of slavery, given its role in the founding of the nation, and given,at the very least, to early (ca. 1947) national commitment to commemoratingAfrican enslavement in the nation’s history44. In an effort to rejuvenate

44. It is not clear whose agenda was advanced through declaring Bunce Island anational monument. It could have been that people in the so-called “hinterlands”were not aware of or interested in preserving this national monument, whilecolonial or, even Krio, authorities interests were best served.



an artifact that symbolically links Africans and Americans of African descent,Joseph Opala has recently turned his focus creating a computer reconstruc-tion of Bunce Island, the site of West Africa’s Rice Coast’s largest slavecastle (Casale 2005). After failed efforts by the US Park Service effort torehabilitate the castle, now an endangered monument, a range of donors hassupported this project. Wealthy African Americans, like Isaiah Washington,for example, have donated money toward this computer reconstruction, dem-onstrating the significance of these markers of the past among AfricanAmericans.

Still, to suggest that African Americans or other African diasporans aresolely focused on slavery would be misguided. To the contrary, many dias-poran Africans who travel to Africa understand that they are making a con-nection to people whose identities are not necessarily “bound up” withslavery and the denigration associated with the practice. DNA ancestry tech-nology provides—at least symbolically—yet another “pre-slavery” linkbetween African Americans and the African continent. As the AfricanAmerican wife said to her Nigerian scientist husband:

“The great promise of genetic ancestry tracing to me as an African American isnot just to know that I am from Africa—this is rather clear to me. The differenceis I want to know what part of Africa I am from. The question is—is it possibleto re-establish the link, sense of who you are, where your family is from? Canwe find our family, the family we have been separated from? We are looking forthe magic bullet [...]. Can DNA testing do this? It will be sufficient to know thatmy family is from Nigeria, Ghana etc. I just want to know the immediate beginningof my family history. Slavery robs us of so much—our culture, our heritage. Thequestion is, can genetics fill this void? I see genetics as a tool to narrow downthe possibilities” (Rotimi 2003).

The costs of these tests, which were once prohibitive, now range from aslittle as $189 to more than one thousand dollars. The tests are commerciallyavailable through for-profit agencies like African Ancestry and through non-profit research efforts like the National Genographic Project. The tests areincreasingly popular; African Ancestry cites that their business doubledevery year for the first four years of operation (Bolnick et al. 2007). Profitsfor this company and others continue to grow, and additional companieswith access to genetic material from African populations have materialized.The rapid uptake of these genetic ancestry services suggest that AfricanAmericans are trying to find (seemingly) incontrovertible evidence of per-sonal and family histories and African membership prior to slavery45.

45. The “jumping over” trope is key in black diasporan understanding of the roleof slavery in their history. Black cultural nationalists, for instance, emphasizethe centrality of slavery but in other instances avoid it all together. On its face,this practice seems contradictory, but when one teases out the effects of suchdiscourses/practices, both, if leveraged effectively, can be “strategies” for dealingwith slavery. The seemingly romantic Afrocentric version of “jumping” slaveryis best exemplified by the black royalty—“when we were kings and queens”—



Afromance and the Art of Intimate “Readings”

One serious limitation of scholarship on African roots tourism is its preoccu-pation with intra-racial discord. These accounts generally treat Africandiasporic and African continental communities as discrete homogenouswholes that are then cast in dichotomous pairings. Besides the fact thatthis schema begs the important question of internal dynamism and diversitywithin each of the contrastive pairs (Skinner 1993), there are few accountsof the ample instances of race-conscious African Americans and Africanswho successfully “read” each other—learning and refining the intimatecounter-global concept and practice of what we call, for lack of a betterterm, “Afro-conjugal dialogue”. In this section, we highlight a compellingexample of this dialogic enterprise.

I (Shabazz) first met Joseph and Shelly while with a friend who wasshopping for gifts in Ghana’s capital, Accra. After exchanging greetings,I learned that Shelly was a “homegirl”. She was from Compton, California,a few miles from my hometown, Inglewood. Compton’s residents, likeInglewood’s, are mostly poor and working class African and HispanicAmericans and undocumented immigrants from Central and South America.These groups fiercely compete for jobs, housing, education, health care, anda decent quality of life. In the US media, Compton is almost exclusivelyknown for crime, poverty, drugs, violent gangs and other perceived social“pathologies”46; tourists are warned to avoid Compton47.

Shelly’s husband, Joseph, is a “Northerner”, someone from any of thethree regions of Northern Ghana—Upper East, Upper West, and Northern.Joseph is a native of Bawku48, an important town in Ghana’s Upper EastRegion. In precolonial times, Northern Ghana was ravaged by the transat-lantic slave trade; a hugely disproportionate number of enslaved Africanswere taken from the region. During the colonial era, the British keptthe Northern territories in a perpetual state of underdevelopment because

narratives. These black royalty narratives, if taken at face value, seem a histori-cal and fanciful. But, in fact, they point to a deeper truth. These narrativesfunction as indirect social criticism (AKYEAMPONG 2000: 194; YANKAH 1995: 51-52): a veiled declaration that black/African people are far better than their currentcondition of racial subordination. MALCOLM X (1967) argued that the white man’sfocus on slavery was a clever ploy to obscure the “true” history and identity of theBlack man. Yet he also routinely invoked a polemical and ludic interpretation ofplantation politics. And Lee D. BAKER (1998) points out how Herskovits, Frazierand Civil Rights strategists dueled over to whether or not to “jump over” thespecter of slavery.

46. Besides this pervasive pathologization, Compton is sometimes exoticized as thehome of Gangsta Rap.

47. For me (Shabazz), however, Compton is a place of endearment and scholarlygrowth. It is where my academic career took root. I made my first foray inAfrocentric scholarship as an undergraduate at Compton Community College.

48. Bawku as of late has featured prominently in Ghanaian print and broadcast mediaas a site of ethnic conflict.



Northerners were viewed as a ready source of unskilled labor. Schools andother markers of “development” arrived in the region relatively late. Today,a disproportionate number of Northerners subsist on mostly unproductivefarms. These conditions have pushed many Northerners to seek an improvedquality of life in southern Ghana where they are often socially stigmatized,politically marginalized, and hired for the most onerous physical tasks.

Afromantic Visions

Joseph recounted how he and his wife, Shelly, first met. Joseph was ona lunch break from the stall where he sells African crafts to tourists. Henoticed Shelly sleeping on a tour bus parked in front of the restaurant wherehe was sitting. According to Joseph, it was love at first sight:

“Joseph: The first day I met her [...] I went to the shop and I told my mom ‘youknow what? I found my heart desire, and I found my love, and I found my wife’.And my mom was like, ‘do you have a fiancee? You don’t have any. Then howcome you found your love?’”

Kwame: [laughs]...

“J [laughing]: [his mom continued] ‘where she from?’ Then I said, you will meether. If you want to meet her, we [Joseph and Shelly] just meet. So she [Joseph’smother] will like to see her and see whether its true. Because when I am here [inmy stall] a lot of people come to me, come to my way—blacks, whites, there areinterested in me, they like me. They like my—they like the way I talk, you know?I always deal with them. I always [inaudible] to sell things for them [...] theydidn’t touch my heart, you know? Before you see somebody you love the personwill [...] their spirit will talk, you know? And their spirit doesn’t go with my spiritso I don’t give my mind to them.”

When Joseph told his parents he was marrying an African American,his mother said “do you know her well, do you think you can deal withher because their life is quite different than we, you know? Things [...]the way they talk, the way they do [...] everything is different”. To that,Joseph responded, “Well [...] she is the one God chose for me. I think weare going to understand each other”.

Shelly explained that Joseph was her “pure thought”, her adolescentvision of her dream companion. Normative American notions of family lifeand adulthood circumvented these thoughts, she felt. Sons and daughtersare sent off to college before they have fully developed into responsibleadults. She said that whereas as American families are career-centered,African families are marriage-centered. The American system forestallsone’s ability to mature into a proper spouse.

Joseph’s grandfather had a dream about Joseph’s future wife. Hisgrandfather told him that he “would meet his wife very soon” and that shewould be “fair”.



“J: So I thought it was oburoni [white person] and I’m like ‘me, I don’t want tomarry oburoni. You know, I told him, and like’ [...]. And he is laughing at meand says ‘why I don’t want to marry oburoni?’ I say ‘no, oburoni is different,their everything is different’. And he says ‘oh, you are going to meet someone whoyou like’ [...]. I came back to Accra [...] two months exactly and I met her [lookingat his wife]—two months.”

I asked Shelly if there have been any challenges, cultural or otherwise,that have made their union difficult.

“S: When I look at him, he looks like me. And we think about some of the samestuff so much that [...]. Our Spirit is higher than any religion, any language, anycolor, or any culture, or any distance. You know, like I say ‘my Spirit is African’.You know what I’m sayin? And just because I happen to be born somewhere elseit doesn’t stop me from being who I am, you know. Because if I was born on aplane, [...] you would still call me a person, I would still be a human being, youwouldn’t [...] define me by my location [...] we go beyond any tangible, any physi-cal, any material, any national definitions. Like our Spirit is higher than that.We have a mission that’s been ordained and called by God so we see each otherin a higher light [...].”

“The only [challenge] is [...] I wouldn’t even say it’s a problem. We’re just learninghow to communicate and that’s important for the marriage, learning how to commu-nicate non-verbally and verbally, you know? Its important because when we stepout, we are one. So we are learning cues from each other. I’m learning how toread him when he tell me don’t buy it and I really want it, and [repeating] he saydon’t buy it and I really want it, so I gotta learn how to read him.”

Shelly’s suggestion of learning to read is evocative. Collective suffer-ing, skin pigmentation, and uncritical renderings of heritage will not sufficeto create enduring, mutually satisfying relationships. Positive relationshipsbetween Africans and African Americans—fraternal, conjugal or other-wise—require serious work. The trope of “reading” bears a resemblanceto the anthropological process of becoming culturally, linguistically, andsocially competent as a field researcher. The ability to “read” seems to usan essential part of the pan-African dialogue.

*

“Whether we knew it or not [...] the Afro-American struggle is inextricably linkedto the struggle in Africa and vice versa” (Kwame Nkrumah cited in Thelwell 2003).

The concept of African roots tourism is deployed for seemingly inchoateends: African officials are seeking foreign capital; local Ghanaians/SierraLeoneans desire tangible evidence of “development”; and African Americanpilgrims are pursuing a spiritual and cultural “connection” with the “Mother-



land”49. Despite African American ambivalence about the bourgeois conno-tations of touring, tourism creates the possibility for African and AfricanAmericans to establish meaningful social, political, cultural, and emotionalties. Further, as AFTA leaders assert, tourism can be an “effective way to dispelthe myths and negative propaganda that keeps Africa divided”. Much of thefledgling scholarship on African roots tourism is lost in a tangle of rhetoricwhile failing to see the possibilities, not to mention the enormous politicalstakes: global asymmetries that perpetuate poor quality of life for too manycontinental and diasporan Africans (Ake 2003; Chinweizu 1987a, 1987b; Clarke1992; Ferguson 2006; Rodney 1994; Williams 1987; Zeleza 2003: 183-184).

Over ten years ago Obiagele Lake (1995) lamented that scholars gener-ally depict Africans as having ideas about identity and things that matterthat are wholly antithetical to their African American counterparts’ (Hartman2002; Lake 1995). We agree. Hasty (2002) does grant a modest conces-sion in this direction, but leaves the impression that Africans and AfricanAmericans have little or no common ground. African American ideas arepresented as idealistic and not grounded in the everyday reality of Africans,while their African counterparts are presumably only concerned with theirimmediate material needs. This Manichean contrast between diasporan ide-alism and African realities, is, in our estimation, exaggerated. This charac-terization does not fully capture the richness of African and black diasporanencounters50. When African Americans travel to Africa it is inevitable thatsome Africans and some African Americans will be disenchanted and disap-pointed. We do not deny inevitability of cross-cultural discordance, butwe do think it is important to devote analytical attention to the full rangeof pan-African encounters. Many are positive and mutually affirming.Some even develop into “Afromances”.

A second issue is that when people claim a historical rootedness inparticular locales, their claims are often emotional. Are emotional tiesincompatible with clear-thinking scholarship? Normative ideas among socialscientists would have us believe so. As anthropologists, we have few toolsfor analyzing emotion that do not exoticize the subjects of our inquiries(Hooks 2001; Mead 2001)51. This raises a more controversial point. We

49. These are merely starting points for interrogating complex social relations, not stablecategories of divergent interests. Some continental Africans are passionate about“connecting” with their African American “cousins” and there are African Ameri-cans roots tourists who exclusively seek profit-generating ventures in Africa.

50. It is remarkable that these respective groups still reach out to one another at allgiven that the vast majority of African Americans have lived for generations inthe US while constantly being fed negative media images of Africa. The samemedia generally depicts African Americans as unintelligent or “natural athletesor entertainers”, or worse, pathologically violent.

51. It would, of course, be unwise to reduce Mead’s work to a simple matter of whatAndrew APTER (1992: 244) has called, in a different context, “exotic alterity”.Moreover, Mead, to her credit, explicitly states the political aim of her culturalproject: a critical social commentary on gender, sexuality and conjugal normsin the “west”.



believe that the highly emotive nature of roots-related field research makescross-racial communication difficult. Many African American roots travel-ers and, to a lesser degree, their race-conscious African counterparts, aredismissive of mainstream scholarship in general, and white scholars in par-ticular. While we make no judgment on this issue, it is important to noteits existence. This is not to say, however, that Blackness/Africanness is aprerequisite for “getting it right”. There are black intellectuals who pathol-ogize black populations (e.g. Patterson 2006), some to the extent of reducingAfrica to a site of “ignorance, squalor, and disease” (Crouch 1995: 81;Richburg 1998). We will leave the final word with one of our many articu-late interlocutors, Shelly:

“The city of Compton is called the hub [...] because it connects L.A. (Los Angeles),Watts, Lynwood, Long Beach, Paramont, Cerritos [...]. You know, it connectsthese cities. And so, Ghana being the hub for the African spirituality worldwide.For the Brazilian African to come and be able to say ‘oh, I’m African’. I cancome here to get [...] grounded in my African spirituality. I don’t necessarily haveget my DNA traced back and go back to the middle of the Congo to say ‘this iswhere I’m from’ because we just want to show you the natural law. You mixedup all they way around, but that doesn’t even matter because the base of you isAfrican so come and find your own level. And I think Ghana is gonna be theplace where [black] people gone come—all over the world [...] to come and findtheir level.”

Department of Anthropology, Harvard University.

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ABSTRACT

In many “developing” and post-conflict African nations, cultural tourism has beentouted as a vital source of foreign exchange revenue for jumpstarting national devel-opment. This trend has led to a scramble in Africa by African state officials seekingto “package” their nations in order to attract the patronage of Diasporan “returnees”—descendants of the Middle Passage who travel to Africa in search of cultural andhistorical “roots”. This situation is further complicated by the fact that the planningand execution of national “packaging” frequently bypasses the ordinary citizen. Thusthe official agenda of these nation states is sometimes at odds with the aspirationsof local citizens and pan-African sojourners. Moreover, this trend has contributedto considerable conceptual slippage and, consequently, vociferous debates over themeaning of and criteria for asserting Africanness. In other instances, these conjunc-tures have transformed and enhanced received notions of African identity. An ethno-graphic comparison of a developing nation (Ghana) and a post-conflict nation (SierraLeone) can both deepen and complicate our understandings of this emerging pan-African phenomenon and its attendant possibilities and limitations. We considerhow these complimentary and conflicting interests, beliefs, and practices converge toshape novel modes of pilgrimage, nationhood, transnational dialogue, and globalization.

RÉSUMÉ

« Trouver sa place » — Tourisme de racines africaines-américaines en Sierra Leoneet au Ghana. — Dans beaucoup de « pays en voie de développement » et dans lesnations africaines sortant d’un conflit armé, on a vanté les mérites du tourisme culturelcomme une source essentielle de revenu pour faire redémarrer le développementnational. Cette tendance a entraîné une ruée chez les fonctionnaires africains pourvendre une certaine image de leur pays dans le but d’attirer la clientèle « de ladiaspora » : les descendants du Middle Passage qui voyagent en Afrique à larecherche de « leurs racines » culturelles et historiques. Cette nouvelle situation estencore compliquée par le fait que l’organisation et la réalisation d’un programmede promotion nationale négligent fréquemment le citoyen ordinaire. Ainsi, le pro-gramme de ces États-nations est parfois en désaccord avec les aspirations des habi-tants locaux et des touristes pan-africains. De plus, cette tendance a contribué à undérapage conceptuel considérable, et a eu, pour conséquence, des débats véhémentssur le sens et sur les critères de l’africanité. Dans d’autres cas, cette situation a trans-formé et durci les idées reçues sur l’identité africaine. Une comparaison ethno-graphique d’un pays en développement, le Ghana, avec un pays sortant d’un conflitarmé, le Sierra Leone, peut approfondir et diversifier la compréhension de ce phéno-mène panafricain émergent ainsi que de ses possibilités afférentes comme de seslimites. Nous examinons comment ces intérêts complémentaires et contradictoires,ces croyances et ces pratiques convergent pour former de nouveaux modes de pèleri-nage, de nationalité, de dialogue transnational et de mondialisation.

Keywords/Mots-clés: Ghana, Sierra Leone, African Diaspora, African-centered, iden-tity, pan-Africanism, post-conflict, roots, tourism, transnationalism/Ghana, SierraLeone, diaspora africaine, identité, pan-africanisme, post-conflit, racines, tourisme,transnationalisme.



"Find Their Level": African American Roots Tourism in Sierra Leone and Ghana by Adia Benton and Kwame Zulu Shabazz

Documents

african interlocutors

ethnonym african american

african diasporan aint

panafrican sojourners

african state officials

notions of african identity

neoafrican americans

postconflict african